The cost of constructing them was a drain on Albania's resources, diverting them away from dealing with the country's housing shortage and poor roads.

[4] From the end of World War II to his death in April 1985, Enver Hoxha pursued a style of politics informed by hardline Stalinism as well as elements of Maoism.

However, a modest relaxation of domestic controls was curtailed by Hoxha in 1973 with a renewed wave of repression and purges directed against individuals, the young and the military, whom he feared might threaten his hold on the country.

A new constitution was introduced in 1976 that increased the Labor Party's control of the country, limited private property, and forbade foreign loans.

[9] Starting in 1967 and continuing until 1986, the Albanian government carried out a policy of "bunkerisation" that saw the construction of hundreds of thousands of bunkers across the country.

[9] They were built in every possible location, ranging from "beaches and mountains, in vineyards and pastures, in villages and towns, even on the manicured lawns of Albania's best hotel".

[10] Hoxha envisaged Albania fighting a two-front war against an attack mounted by Yugoslavia, NATO or the Warsaw Pact, involving a simultaneous incursion by up to eleven enemy airborne divisions.

As he put it, "If we slackened our vigilance even for a moment or toned down our struggle against our enemies in the least, they would strike immediately like the snake that bites you and injects its poison before you are aware of it.

Members of the Young Pioneers, the Hoxhaist youth movement, were trained to defend against airborne invasion by fixing pointed spikes to treetops to impale descending foreign parachutists.

[12] The bunkers were constructed of concrete, steel and iron and ranged in size from one- or two-person pillboxes with gun slits[10] to large underground nuclear bomb shelters intended for use by the Party leadership and bureaucrats.

[20] The most common type of bunker is a small concrete dome set into the ground with a circular bottom extending downwards, just large enough for one or two people to stand inside.

[21] At various places along the coast, large numbers of QZ bunkers were built in groups of three, linked to each other by a prefabricated concrete tunnel.

At Linza near the capital, Tirana, a network of tunnels some 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) long was built to protect members of the Interior Ministry and the Sigurimi (the secret police) from nuclear attack.

On average, they are said to have each cost the equivalent of a two-room apartment and the resources used to build them could easily have resolved Albania's chronic shortage of housing.

The bunkers were presented by the Party as both a symbol and a practical means of preventing Albania's subjugation by foreign powers, but some viewed them as a concrete expression of Hoxha's policy of isolationism – keeping the outside world at bay.

[11] It has been argued that the bunkerisation programme was a form of "patterned large-scale construction" that "has a disciplinary potential as a means of familiarising a population with a given order of rule".

"[29] General Beqir Balluku, the Defense Minister and a member of the Politburo, publicly criticised the bunker system in a 1974 speech and disputed Hoxha's line that Albania was under equal threat from the United States and the Soviet Union.

[30] He argued that Albania needed a modern, well-equipped professional army rather than a poorly trained and equipped civilian militia.

[24] The introduction of a new constitution two years later sealed Hoxha's absolute control of the military by appointing him as Commander-in-Chief of the Albanian People's Army and Chairman of the Defence Council.

[32] The extreme secrecy of Hoxha's regime meant that Albania's subsequent governments lacked information on how the bunkers had been used, or even how many had been built.

In 2004 Albanian officials discovered a forgotten stockpile of 16 tons of mustard gas and other chemical weapons in an unguarded bunker only 40 kilometres (25 mi) from Tirana.

The Albanian army has carried out bunker removal programmes along the coastline, dragging them out of the ground with modified Type 59 tanks.

During the Albanian insurrection of 1997, the townspeople of Sarandë in southern Albania were reported to have taken up positions in bunkers around the town in the face of fighting between government troops and rebels.

[40] There have been various suggestions for what to do with them: ideas have included pizza ovens, solar heaters, beehives, mushroom farms, projection rooms for drive-in cinemas, beach huts, flower planters, youth hostels, and kiosks.